Labour perspectives on the new politics of skill and competency formation: International reflections

Abstract

Skill/competency approaches to workplace-based policy seek to assess and train for discrete individual competencies with the goal of increasing employability and productivity. These approaches have become increasingly prominent across a range of advanced capitalist countries. A substantial critique has emerged over this same period regarding issues of instrumentality and social control, as well as the failure of skill/compentancy approaches to articulate a meaningful understanding of human learning capacities. In this article, these critical perspectives are clarified further by a review of contributions to understanding the skill/competence question emerging from sociology of work literature. Building from these critiques, this article outlines recent experiences with and perspectives on skill/competency frameworks amongst different national labour movements. Included in this outline is a more detailed, comparative analysis of Norway and Canada; here we see the lofty ‘new’, ‘knowledge economy’ rhetoric – in two countries where one might expect to see it blossom in application – brought down to earth by the realities of industrial relations, employer intransigence and intra-labour movement differences. ‘Skill/competence’ proves to be a floating signifier that, amongst both employers and labour, stands as a proxy for ‘power/control’ struggles. Degenerating in this way, from a labour perspective, the new politics of skill/competency formation is seen to have spiraled toward irrelevance in Norway and Canada; awaiting, in both countries, a re-invigoration through attention to changes in the participatory structure of the labour process itself.